13 Ways of Looking
(In which we consider the pandemic, ginseng, decomposition, and also Severance.)
vii. why do you imagine golden birds?
To know a person is to be able to see them at their most ordinary.
To love a person is to find the beauty in the ordinary.
When we look elsewhere, when we seek to escape the everyday in a fantasy—the golden bird instead of the blackbird, the far-off vacation spot instead of the attentively and surprisingly arranged breakfast plate at home, the bucket list instead of presence in the beauty of the plainness of the moment—we see not what is in front of us but instead an illusion spun from a fantasy of distance from the everyday, and from ourselves.
When you look at the ginseng plant, spend some time trying to see beyond the shock of the unfamiliar, the fantasy of the exotic.
What if the plant on the page were not located in the early modern Chinese past? What if distance did not define its interest, or its power?
Know the plant as a botanical companion that occupies the same historical moment that you do.
Know its power as a closeness. Find its beauty in its ordinariness.
Be where you are.
That, up there, is a piece of a recent essay I’d like to share with you. It’s an essay about how to look at the image that’s right above it.
Let’s back up a bit, though.
I've talked elsewhere about this, but I believe it deeply and so I'll say it again (and again)(and again): How we attend to other entities, experiences, people, texts, objects, to ourselves - our acts and practices of attending, the character of our attention, make them what/who they are.
Because attention helps things (helps us) to come apart.
And in coming apart, we become ourselves - and we become those (ephemeral, momentary, metamorphosing) selves always, always in relation.
(For some inspiring recent work on attention, check out Dominic Pettman's stuff, like this, which he's been sharing parts of on his Substack.)
For me, this is not just an idea but a principle of practice. It's become a core element of how I do what I do. In that spirit, I thought I'd share a recent piece that precipitates from that practice. You'll find it linked here for free. Above, I’ve included the image that my text refers to in its original context in a catalog for an exhibition at the Huntington Library, Growing and Knowing in the Gardens of China. When you see references to “Detail 1” in the text, it’s that image, above.
OK so here's some background:
I was interested in how our experiences of pandemic media have reshaped how we attend to the world. And how those experiences (which for me were profound) in turn remade how, as a historian, I worked with documents.
I was inspired by the approach to looking embodied in Wallace Stevens' 13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. I spent some time attending carefully to each part of that poem, and what resulted from that attention drove how I approached the document I was working with. This may not be obvious at first glance (which is why I’m telling you here) but if you read the Stevens poem, you'll see those relationships in each corresponding element of my own essay. The titles of each subsection - “among twenty snowy mountains,” “I was of three minds,” etc - mark the specific element of the corresponding section of Stevens' poem that I was working with. Like the selection I started this post with. Or like this:
ix. out of sight
One way of knowing ginseng is to not try to know it.
What is adjacent to it? Try to focus on that instead.
What seems to have nothing to do with it?
Make that the object of your study of ginseng.
How might we try to know about ginseng as an absence around which other things gather?
Or like this:
x. would cry out
Seeing an object in a certain light can move us bodily. The experience elicits expression from us that is beyond proper language, perhaps beyond language at all. To know an object in this way, you often have to forget what you know.
How does your body know ginseng?
What might your guts, your movements, your sensations teach you about the plant?
Or like this:
xi. he mistook / the shadow
Sometimes we see things that aren’t there, at least not in the way we think: shadows, apparitions, mistaken visions of all sorts (all of these were powerful entities in the history of Chinese medicine, and Li Shizhen was deeply interested in them):
Opening your dresser drawer and imagining that you see a ginseng root among your socks.
Carrying your basket through the produce aisle and spotting ginseng nestled in with the carrots.
Plucking a weed from your garden and hearing the sound of a child’s cry.
What might these apparitions teach you?
What might you learn about ginseng by taking ghosts as your teachers?
(For readers who are annoyed by this oblique approach to discipline: that's fine. Don't read it. Go watch Severance instead: this week's episode was pretty great. Patricia Arquette is a goddess.)
For readers who are still with me: thank you. I appreciate you. I'm sending love out into the universe to you. Have fun with the essay. Get in touch if you want to talk about this (or whatever). I’ll be back soon. - Carla xo